E3 2013: Challenging Friends in DriveClub

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By Andrew Goldfarb

Back in February, Sony announced the PlayStation 4 alongside four first-party titles. Aside from Knack, an impressive platformer that you can read all about on IGN today, Sony brought heavy hitters like Killzone and Infamous to its conference, pushing the next-gen evolution of some of its keystone franchises. Surprisingly, though, it’s the fourth title Sony revealed that may be the most next-gen of all: Evolution Studios’ first-person racer, DriveClub.

DriveClub’s pitch is simple: it’s a pretty, super-realistic racing game that allows friends to connect with one another online. It may not sound like a novel concept, but the depth of DriveClub’s social features is actually quite ambitious.

“It is all about driving within groups of people and how it connects to your social life and your social networks, essentially,” Evolution technical art director Alex Perkins told IGN. “The whole social element is always to reward somebody and find somebody to connect with. As you learn and play better, you just adjust.”

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Players can issue challenges to friends and race either asynchronously or competitively online, with a plethora of granular tweaks including the ability to edit parameters such as the time of day or amount of clouds. “You’re racing at night and it’s cloudy. When it’s dark, that’s going to be way harder than a clear night sky or midday. All those things can make the challenges quite individual,” Perkins told us.

The game is also able to create new challenges based on your own racing. “It records everything that you do,” Perkins said. “It’ll pick up challenges from anyone you race. It’ll try and analyze what you’re doing, how well you’re doing and preview scores that are close to what you’re doing.”

DriveClub was announced as a racing game with cars that the studio has “gone borderline insane” recreating accurately, and even in Sony’s E3 build (which it told us is only 35% complete), the results are impressive. Our demo included an Audio R8 V10 Plus and Pagani Huarya, and each required its own unique learning curve. The Audi is easy to handle, while the Huarya picked up speed insanely quickly but will have you breaking earlier to compensate, causing you to spin out.

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“In MotorStorm we always tried to get the sense of feel and location and we’re doing the same thing now. It’s just that we’re trying to treat it more cinematically. It’s like if you go out for a film, you shoot what’s really there and then you grade it and treat it and polarize it and do all those sort of coherent ritual grading and feeling to everything afterwards, and we’re trying to approach it more in that way.”

“You see that sunset?” Perkins asked. “Because of the way the clouds are formed, you’re the only one who will ever see that sunset. You’ll probably be the last one to see that. It gives us a bigger hill to climb if we have to try to make that thing work all the time every time, but it gives a sense of reward and depth every time you play. It’s a cinemagraphic feeling to things. It’s like we capture things as they are in real life, and then make it look and feel how we want it to.”

For terrible racers such as myself, your car will acquire damage as you collide with every solid surface you can find, and all of those changes are reflected on the body of the car itself if you switch to DriveClub’s third-person external view. Yes, DriveClub does allow you to opt out of its first-person perspective, though according to Perkins, first person was chosen as the default to give players more of a connection, as well as more of a sense of the car’s speed and location, by showing them what they’d see if they were actually driving.

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Evolution has mimicked the entire dashboard and interiors of the dozens of cars included in DriveClub, and Perkins explained that the studio worked with manufacturers to ensure that all cars were exactly as they should be.

“All the lights, everything works as it does in the car. All the manufacturers were like ‘if you’re going to put that level of detail in, it’s got to work as it does in real life,’” he told us. “We actually get the cab data they built. Everything from the manufacturer comes from their 3D cabinet. We’d take that and then convert it and put it into the cars. So we are exactly as accurate as the manufacturer.”